"The NH-U9S heatsink stands 125mm tall and has a square footprint of 95x95mm. Weighing 618grams, the heatsink is built around five 6mm diameter heatpipes which are soldered to the aluminum cooling fins and copper base plate in typical Noctua fashion. "continue »

This is not your average aluminum heatsink with copper heatpipes, but it looks innocent enough from the outside. The Xigmatek HDT-S963 heatsink is a unique thermal solution because the German thermal engineers who designed it.

The Intel RCBFH design is engineered to be cheap to produce, easy to install, and thermally efficient. This is the stock Core 2 Duo heatsink, and it is generally speaking a well designed mass-produced cooler.

The Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 LP is a
low profile AMD Athlon64 heatsink for media centers, or any situation where the compact size of the computer case limits the vertical profile of the thermal solution.

Rosewill ship the RCX-Z1 with a patch of pre-applied thermal compound and a PCI bracket fan speed controller. The 92mm spins at between 1700-310RPM, which generates as much as 54 dBA, according to our real world sound measurements.

On the plus side, the central copper column makes direct contact with the CPU core, and the skived component which is soldered on to it radiates the heat out into the surroundings so the thermal pathway is pretty direct.